Half-Life 2 Forum

Got it to work great- pretty fast gameplay and everything. Just a few weird things:

• any sprites in the game have this white square with an x in it surrounding them. Pretty annoying and sometimes makes it difficult to see

• some of the models appear without lighting (i.e. they are full brightness and unaffected by shadows). This changes sometimes when you shoot the item or pick it up/move it. Makes it easy to spot power ups but looks like crap

• Sometimes the game pauses for a second at a time, this happens with all my crossover games (HL1/TFC/etc) perhaps it is a common bug. Pretty annoying when playing online games but bearable.

anyone else having similar problems or any graphic settings I can use to fix this?

JR wrote:

• any sprites in the game have this white square with an x in it
  surrounding them. Pretty annoying and sometimes makes it difficult
  to see

• some of the models appear without lighting (i.e. they are full
  brightness and unaffected by shadows). This changes sometimes when
  you shoot the item or pick it up/move it. Makes it easy to spot
  power ups but looks like crap

This sounds like something graphics driver related, and as if the game runs in dxlevel 60 or 70, without shaders. Which graphics card do you have, and which driver do you use?

JR wrote:

• Sometimes the game pauses for a second at a time, this happens
  with all my crossover games (HL1/TFC/etc) perhaps it is a common
  bug. Pretty annoying when playing online games but bearable.

This can be caused by other programs. Running in the background. Can you try to close all background apps? Sometimes Steam itself misbehaves, it can help to close the Steam window after starting the game(during the "preparing to launch..." dialog)

Also Valve Anti Cheat causes this problem in some rare cases. If you see it in multiplayer games, but not in single player ones that might be the reason.

I have a mac mini so the graphics card is integrated:

Intel GMA 950:

Chipset Model: GMA 950
Type: Display
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 64 MB of shared system memory
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x27a2
Revision ID: 0x0003

When I run it with -dxlevel 60 and 70 many of the models in game do not appear until im right beside them. As for the steam problem, I cannot minimise when pre-loading so it may be that steam is responsible after all.

The Intel GMA 950 isn't suitable for gaming in general, it just is too slow for reasonable framerates. However, people have run the game successfully on Macbooks with this card, just at pretty bad framerates. None of them have reported the problems you're seeing, but there have been reports of vertex shader problems in CS Source. Can you make sure that you have all MacOS updates installed?

That the models show up only when you're close to them in dxlevel 60/70 isn't a bug, it is intended behavior of Half Life 2. It doesn't draw decoration objects until you're close to improve the framerate. Models important to the gameplay like enemies or explosive barrels are drawn at any distance however.

thanks for the advice! after updating I dont have to -dxlevel anything to get it to work, so I dont have the disappearing things happening anymore. Still, I have the unrendered models in the game such as trees/boxes/poles/pipes that you can see in the linux screenshot on the screenshots page. Is there anyway to fix this?

In some graphics settings I have this rendering problem fixed but with NPC model problems like malformed headcrabs (misplaced vertexes and so on). Is there any way to have normal looking NPCs and normal rendered objects?

Cant fix the sprite boxes yet, also the sun is always visible even through brushes.

Also, any tips on Portal? I cant even get it to open trying all my HL2 tweaks and graphic settings.

Thanks

Half-Life 2 remembers the last -dxlevel option that you supplied. So, if you most recently used "-dxlevel 60" or "-dxlevel 70", then HL2 will keep using that until you tell it otherwise.

So, I would suggest that you launch it once with "-dxlevel 81" just to make sure you're back to normal.